Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

How Income Inequality changed in Germany following Reunification: An empirical Analysis using Decomposable Inequality Measures

Trends in the Income Distribution of Unified Germany Analyzed by Decomposable Inequality Measures

Using Panel Data on Income Satisfaction to Estimate the Equivalence Scale Elasticity

Living Conditions of Children and Parental Well-Being - Evidence from German Data on Life Satisfaction

Unmet Aspirations as an Explanation for the Age U-shape in Human Wellbeing

A large literature in behavioral and social sciences has found that human wellbeing follows a U-shape over age. Some theories have assumed that the U-shape is caused by unmet expectations that are felt painfully in midlife but beneficially abandoned and experienced with less regret during old age. In a unique panel of 132,609 life satisfaction expectations matched to subsequent realizations, I find ...

Social and Economic Integration of Foreigners in Germany

Essays in Behavioural Economics

The goal of behavioural economics is to improve classic microeconomic theory by introducing motives and concepts from related fields like psychology and sociology. The driving paradigm of most neo-classical economic research is the concept of the Homo Oeconomicus, a human who approaches all problems in a rational and typically selfish way and who possesses boundless computational power and flawless ...

Life Satisfaction in Adult Survivors of Cancer During Adolescence: What Contributes to the Latter Satisfaction of Life?

Purpose To compare the general and health-related life satisfaction (LS) in long-term survivors of adolescent cancer with a community sample and to identify medical and psychosocial factors associated with LS. Methods LS of 820 survivors (ageM = 30.4 ± 6.0 years; time since diagnosis M = 13.7 ± 6.0 years) was assessed with the Questions on Life Satisfaction (FLZM) and compared to an age- and sex-matched ...

A distribution-sensitive examination of the gender wage gap in Germany

This paper provides a new examination of the gender pay gap for Germany based on a family of distribution-sensitive indicators. Wage distributions for men and women do not only differ by a fixed constant; differences are more complex. We show that focusing on the bottom of the wage distribution reveals a larger gender gap. Our distribution-sensitive analysis can also be used to study whether the statistical ...

Changes in Family Income around the Time of Birth of Children in Germany between 1985 and 2004

While the course and the determinants of fertility behaviour have been investigated intensively, the monetary consequences of birth have hardly been considered empirically to date. Therefore, this paper focuses on the short-term (equivalent) household income changes around the time of births in a longitudinal perspective and examines them for their causes. For the analyses of the longitudinal data ...